BIOS
SANDRA HINDMAN
Dr. Sandra Hindman, the owner of Les Enluminures, is a leading expert
on Medieval and Renaissance manuscript illumination.
Professor Emerita of Art History at Northwestern University, Hindman
became involved in the art market in the 1980s and established Les
Enluminures in 1991. The name is French for “illuminations” and reflects
one of the gallery’s specialties – illuminated manuscripts.
Today, the gallery has offices in Chicago, New York and Paris, and its
list of clients includes the Louvre, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and
the British Museum.
Hindman is the author, coauthor or editor of more than 10 books, as well
as numerous articles on the history and reception of illuminated
manuscripts and on medieval rings. Her publications include “The Robert
Lehman Collection. IV. Illuminations” (New York Metropolitan Museum of
Art, 1997); “Manuscript Illumination in the Modern Age: Recovery and
Reconstruction” (Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, 2001); and
“Toward an Art History of Medieval Rings: A Private Collection” (Paris,
2007).
She is a member of the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of America,
the National Antique and Art Dealers Association of America, the
Syndicat National de la Librairie Ancienne et Moderne and the Syndicat
National des Antiquaires.
Hindman is currently overseeing Les Enluminures’ exhibit, “The Idda
Collection,” which includes 16 extraordinary early manuscripts
representing the transmission and use of the Bible from the Dark Ages
into the 12th-century Renaissance. This exhibit will run from April 9
through May 2, 2015 in New York City.
CHRISTOPHER DE HAMEL
Dr. Christopher de Hamel, who became Senior Vice President of Les
Enluminures in September 2014, is perhaps the world’s greatest expert
on medieval manuscripts.
He most recently wrote the catalog for Les Enluminures’ current exhibit,
“The Idda Collection, which” is available in New York City from April 9 to
May 2, 2015. Dr. de Hamel said of the collection, “Touch any one of the
manuscripts here and they transport you halfway back to the time of
Jesus.”
His books on manuscripts and book collecting have been translated into
at least seven languages, and he has lectured on every continent
(except Antarctica) at many of the greatest libraries and museums in the
world.
Since 2000, de Hamel has been a Fellow and Librarian of Corpus Christi
College, Cambridge, where he is responsible for the Parker Library, one
of the finest small collections of manuscripts in the world, including the
sixth-century Gospel Book of Saint Augustine and the 12th-century Bury
Bible.
He has doctorates from Oxford and Cambridge, as well as two honorary
doctorates, and is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries. For 25 years,
he was in charge of all sales of medieval manuscripts at Sotheby‘s,
including the Gospel of Henry the Lion, which was the most expensive
work of art ever sold for five years after its sale in 1983.
His numerous publications on medieval Bibles and biblical manuscripts
include “Glossed Books of the Bible and the Origins of the Paris Book
Trade” (Boydell & Brewer, 1984); “The Book, A History of the Bible”
(Phaidon, 2001, also in French, German, Japanese and Korean); and
“Bibles, An Illustrated History from Papyrus to Print (Bodleian Library,
2011). He gave the 2014 Panizzi Lectures at the British Library on
Romanesque Bibles.
LAURA LIGHT
Laura Light, senior cataloguer and researcher at Les Enluminures, is a
world-renowned expert on the medieval Bible and the principal author of
the catalogue on “The Idda Collection.”
She holds degrees in history from Bryn Mawr and in medieval history
from UCLA. She has written numerous books and articles on the
medieval Bible, in particular on the Bible in the 13th century.
She has published widely on the Paris Bible – first produced about 1230
-- and its precursors, including an exhibition catalogue on the Bible for
Harvard University, where she worked as cataloguer of medieval
manuscripts at the Houghton Library.
In the late 1980s, she updated and improved the catalogue descriptions
of the library’s more than 1,300 medieval manuscripts – a monumental
task. Then in 1996, Houghton Mifflin published her book, “Medieval and
Renaissance Manuscripts in the Houghton Library, Harvard University.”
She recently helped edited a book on “Form and Function in the Late
Medieval Bible.”